Basics about How to write Threats to Validity Section
- Threats to construct validity are concerned with the relationship between theory and observation.
EXAMPLE: You design some heuristics to build a dataset (e.g., for code reuse) and draw conclusion (about code reuse) on the dataset. But your heuristics may not cover all the code reuse scenarios. - Threats to internal validity are concerned with the factors that may affect a dependent variable and were not considered in the study.
EXAMPLE: You consider a paper as a baseline, and the paper does not release its replication package. so you replicate/re-implement the baseline based on your understanding on the paper. - Threats to conclusion validity are concerned with the relationship between the treatment and the outcome.
EXAMPLE: You conduct some manual labeling in your work. Does your manual label process can guarantee the correctness of all the cases? - Threats to external validity are concerned with the generalizability of our results.
EXAMPLE: Your experiment is conducted in Java, are your findings/conclusions also hold in other PLs?
Please do NOT use "internal threat" to refer to "Threats to internal validity". It's simply WRONG.